Monday, November 07, 2011

Sensitive and Inside Big Technology: Views from the Other Side (Part One)

This is part one of a four-part piece based on
interviews with people inside the high-tech industry who’ve become
electro-sensitive and begun to question the silence that pervades their field
on the matter. To protect their future ability to find work, we’ve used
pseudonyms.

Located in the Pacific Northwest, ‘Nora Wood’ has worked
in high tech for many years, but now finds herself reckoning with the effect
her work environment is having on her health and well-being. She sees a lot of
good in technology when it’s wisely used. She’s in her mid-forties and has a
sharp mind.

It was a six-month period of working at home, between
stints doing high-tech office-based work, that brought the problem to the fore.
She felt better at home, but then when she started up her current temporary
contract with a major tech company, the troubles returned: hair-trigger
irritability, sleep problems, and brain-fog. In the office job before the
stretch at home, she’d noticed the wifi routers directly over her workspace,
but hadn’t put the pieces together.

“I remember thinking, even early on, that it can’t be
good to have cell phone repeaters bouncing the signal around inside a shielded
office building.” Now she was determined to find out what was causing her
problems. She read up online, and got an RF meter, which confirmed that indeed
there were high levels around her workspace. One time her Cornet meter
topped out with a spike 100 microwatts per square centimeter (µW/cm2), with
base levels of 1 to 3 µW/cm2. (Compare to the Bioinitiative
Report recommendation of 0.1 µW/cm2 maximum human exposure.) In
addition, she became aware of how a nearby cell tower was part of her home
environment. She’s done some rearranging and shielding at home, but at work
there’s less she can do, working in an open room with others. She has a
grounding pad under her desk, which has helped her feel better at work.

Has she broached the subject with coworkers or
management? “They’ve seen me using my grounding pad, but I don’t think they
want to hear there is anything wrong with their work environment.” She’s
tried to explain the way the pad worked in terms of free-radicals and positively
charged electrons, “but they still think it’s tin-foil-hat weirdness.”

“They were interested in the RF meter, until I told them
the levels I was getting, and they were like, ‘Yeah, but there’s no evidence,
no research that’s a problem.’ People in tech are defensive about
radio-frequency, because any question about it is going to disrupt their
whole world view.”

“If I go full time, I might be able to get my work area
configured for some shielding. I don’t think I can work for a huge corporation
like Google or Amazon, where I’d have to work on-site every day, all day. But
those are the jobs that pay.”

The industry will be squeezing out the older worker
faster, as the environment gets saturated with RF, and the denial gets thicker,
and more people become ill. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. My
brain isn’t working as well. I feel like I’m doing lesser quality work, and
that people perceive me as less smart.” High-tech work is and will be disabling
its workers, while the industry refuses to admit the fact.

What will she do in a few months when her contract ends,
and she needs another job? She’ll definitely be considering RF exposure when
choosing where to work. “I’ll be looking at the set-up, and comparing it to
what I already know. I can get creative with questions during the interview, to
find out about the wireless coverage in the building without letting them know
I’m trying to assess potential exposure. I could also have my meter on inside
my handbag, and see what the spikes are, without bringing it out.”

‘Nora’ believes tech has a lot of potential to help
people and promote social good, and she cites the example of farmers in Africa
texting to get market prices, giving them real bargaining power, rather than
relying on the word of deceiving middlemen. “It’s just a shame that there is
this horrific other side to it. I’m really conflicted.”

So could technology itself help people address or
mitigate exposures? One company, Tawkon (see also this article), has created an app that
calculates and displays the likely radiation exposure for the user at any given
time, along with a load related features (of course). Apple recently blocked this app for iPhone, though.
‘Nora’ believes open-source Google Android has a better chance of being the
venue for radiation-related apps, because there is complete freedom for
individual programmers to introduce ideas that could never fly in a top-down
corporation like Apple.

“Sharing information is crucial. If you can get a
certain number of engineers engaged and understanding the issue, they can
create ways to make the technology less detrimental. Like, make it so when
your phone rang, it would turn all the other unnecessary stuff off, all the
synching, GPS—while it’s near your head.” Once she gets going, there’s a
flow of ideas. “You could use the accelerometer inside the phone to sense
speed, and shut off automatic connections when you are moving over a certain
speed, like in a car,”—that’s when radiation levels from the phone go up. There
could be great scope for creativity—once the industry silence has cracked
open.

For ‘Nora’ this is a wide-open field full of interesting
problems to be solved. She’s a software engineer at heart, and the only
difference between her and her co-workers, is that she knows firsthand that
this is a problem to work on. But unfortunately, even a load of engineers
working wisely to mitigate personal exposure from phones will not address the
issue of the ambient, whole-body, 24/7 radio-frequency most of us are exposed
to. Indeed, it was the work environment, not personal phone use, that made
‘Nora’ ill.

We hope she can stay in the game long enough to use her
brains and her experience to help educate others and eliminate some of the
frivolous exposure that people get, simply because nearly the whole industry is
in deep and total denial.

It’s clear that if ‘smart’ meter engineers had also been
addressing the problem of reducing human exposure to RF, they could have
designed a very different device, one that accounted for human health and
well-being, not merely corporate convenience and profit.

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About Me

While I have always been extremely health conscious and am presently in excellent health, I did become temporarily out-of-commission (i.e. I was really sick) in 2005 with a number of at the time unexplainable symptoms. I was quite puzzled at the time because I had been eating mainly organically grown food, drinking spring water, doing Yoga every morning, and going to the gym several times a week. In other words, I was doing everything one is supposed to do to stay healthy. I was not supposed to get sick. It took me six months before discovering or even imagining the main source of the problem - which was in fact "overexposure to electromagnetic" - especially microwave - radiation. I was living within 200 meters of two cell phone towers at the time and within 500 meters of a 3rd one with numerous WiFi signals bleeding into my apartment from adjacent neighbors. I developed a host of symptoms, which are found in what has been misleadingly described as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) -- but much more accurately described as Radio Wave or Microwave Sickness. Large numbers of people in the USA suddenly started getting sick in 1984...